Talk:Main Page

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Propose rename

I propose to rename this article 'Introduction to uk.d-i-y Wiki' and then to put a redirect here to the contents page, so that first time visitors go straight to contents (Special:Allpages). This is currently being discussed on uk.d-i-y NT 13:37, 15 August 2008 (BST)

Serious Errors

A couple of pages return only

"Internal Server Error, this is an error with your script, check your error log for more information."

One such is Hammer. The error occurred after I put some pic names in with spaces in them by mistake. I corrected them, but no change. I deleted the article and reinstated it as Hammer rather than Hammers - for some reason the error has followed it to the new article name, although I cant find any fault in the wikicode.

Googling the error msg got me nowhere, and searching wikipedia (which also uses wikimedia) ditto.

Any ideas?? NT 00:57, 13 September 2008 (BST)

I mentioned this to Grunff the other day. He was going to look into it.

--John Rumm 02:46, 13 September 2008 (BST)

An image, Hatchet_622-3.jpg, returns a server error, and its presence on the hammer page was the cause of the problem on that page. I deleted the image and the link to it, now the rest of the page displays fine. But why the wiki has a problem with the image I dont know... too bloodthirsty maybe? It displays no prob on my software, and was created / edited / named the same way as a lot of other images on this wiki.

There is another image somewhere causing the same problem. If you spot which article its on let me know, and I should be able to find and remove the problem image. What the cause is and how to fix it I dont yet know.

Meanwhile I'll try uploading the hatchet image in another form so its available for anyone able to troubleshoot. NT 11:24, 13 September 2008 (BST)

Wiki errors on the jpg, wont take a zip, bmp is too large, and gifs also too big. Will try zipping and renaming it .txt. jeez, wont even do that NT 11:41, 13 September 2008 (BST)

ok, reduced filesize version of image now at Hatchet_622-5.jpg and it gives the same error. NT 11:48, 13 September 2008 (BST)

Suspect users

There are lots of suspect user names registered, and these are used for mass junk attacks, a small one of which happened today with 5 or 6 articles affected. Is there a way to block lots of user names that have never edited any article yet? Do we want to do that? Any policies would be good to follow if doing so? NT 11:39, 20 December 2008 (GMT)

Ban times

Is it a good idea to tell spammers when they can come back, or would we be better just saying they will be banned? NT 21:54, 6 April 2009 (BST)

You might be right. I doubt it matters much on anon IP addresses though... --John Rumm 02:05, 7 April 2009 (BST)

True. There's always one though, so I tweaked it. Why some people post the junk they do I'll never know, they don't all seem especially rational in their choice of actions. Some people can be remarkably persistent over trivial things. NT 13:50, 7 April 2009 (BST)

I expect much of this is a combined group / bot effort. Someone scouts pages that are spammable and perhaps does some prep like creating a topic/talk page - perhaps flags it with a random looking unique tag string. The actual spamming then gets done by botnets working on scripted orders. Much of it probably driven by people offering "search engine optimisation" services - attempting to get better page rank in google etc. Its probably simpler to go for the grape shot approach rather than worry about which sites will or won't provide any advantage. --John Rumm 16:04, 7 April 2009 (BST)